


Anyone's Ghost

by placentalmammal



Series: Valerie [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M, Preference Play, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 10:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/placentalmammal/pseuds/placentalmammal





	Anyone's Ghost

Valerie Cruz could have been beautiful. She was tall and naturally slender, with had elegant hands and a face that suggested a state of perpetual, artful ennui. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her as a pre-war starlet, hanging off a crime boss’ arm or lounging poolside with an imported cigarette between her red-painted lips.

Instead, she was just another desert rat in the Mojave Wasteland. Her blonde hair was dry and brittle, braided into an ugly yellow rope. Her lovely face was lined and windburnt; her hands were calloused and knotted. She was twenty-nine, she looked thirty-five, and the great tragedy of her life was the simple fact that she could have been beautiful.

She was a burnout. She drank too much, she laughed too loudly, she went to bed with men who didn’t care much for her, and she would be dead before her fortieth birthday.

Arcade didn’t know this when she staggered through the gate of Old Mormon Fort. He knew that she had a reputation around Freeside; she’d run a few errands for James and Francine Garret and done a few favors for the Kings (favors, in this context, referring to acts of a sexual nature). But Julie seemed to like her, and Arcade had resigned himself to seeing more of her when she asked him, point blank, if he would accompany her on her mad quest for glory and revenge.

There was something romantic about her. She reminded him, inexplicably, of Odysseus’ Penelope (if Penelope had got tired of waiting, cut her losses, and set out alone into the desert). Valerie wasn’t a tragic figure, just a woman on a mission. It was a stupid mission, one she didn’t expect to survive, but it was all her own, and he liked her for it.

She might have been a loudmouth with poor taste in men, but there was a lot to like about Valerie. She was generous and genuinely clever, and she had about as much tolerance for slavers as Arcade did for typographical errors. In a previous life, she had attended a medical school (Arcade never did find out why she’d dropped out and fled to the Mojave), and she had honed her skills as a wandering doctor. She’d spent nearly seven years pulling teeth, setting broken bones, delivering babies and Brahmin calves, in addition to her courier work.

If she were a man, Arcade would have been head-over-heels in love. She was well-read and coarse enough to be interesting. Valerie had lived in a way that few wastelanders could afford to. Most men were concerned with survival and the next rainfall, Valerie existed in a realm without earthly concerns. She had no family, no roots, and no permanent residence. She was a drifter, a heroic figure straight out of the pulpy westerns Arcade pretended he was too sophisticated to read.

In a word, reckless.

It was that streak that led to the raid on the Fiends’ base in Vault 3 and the openmouthed kiss in Motor Runner’s throne room.

The two of them (and her dog, a Frankenstein on loan from the King) found themselves traveling through Fiend territory on an errand for Michelangelo. Valerie was flying high, on liquor or on life, it didn’t matter. Arcade made an offhand comment about the raiders, and she said the landscape would be prettier without them.

The impulse snowballed into a full-out assault that left them breathless and bloodspattered in the Vault’s lowest level. He looked at her, she looked at him. Then she abruptly closed the distance between them, her hands on either side of his face. It was sloppy and sad and almost sweet; a tangle of teeth and lips and emotion: longing and lust and loneliness and silent, perverse desperation.

She knocked his glasses askew and sucked the air from his lungs. Arcade realized he hadn’t kissed a woman since he was nineteen (and he hadn’t been kissed quite so passionately in almost as long). He wasn’t attracted to Valerie, but he was near as lonely as she was. Their friendship had been unexpected, an accidental connection in a desert full of unattached strangers. Neither of them had anything like love in their lives since they outgrew fairy tales, and the line between a companion and a romance had blurred considerably in the years since.

He was on the verge of giving in, of letting her pull him onto Motor Runner’s throne, of giving hetereosexuality just one last try. But the ball falling through his mind landed in the slot marked ‘not today,’ so he pulled away from her.

“Valerie,” he said, gently.

She was coming down hard and, and she started to cry. “I love you,” she sobbed. “I love you, I love you, I-”

Her sobs tore through him like a cold wind, but he was afraid to touch her. “You don’t,” he said.

“I do,” she insisted, “You don’t understand.”

There was a long moment of tear-stained silence between them. “You’ll feel better once we get out of here,” he muttered. “Come on.”

He left, and mercifully, she followed.

It was dusk on the surface, and they made camp in the foothills west of Fiend territory. They had cold canned beans for dinner, and laid down in their respective bedrolls. She had stopped crying once they were out of the Vault, but she started again as the air cooled and the stars came out. Arcade kept his back to her and pretended he couldn’t hear her.

When he woke, Valerie and the dog were gone. He wasn’t surprised.


End file.
